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Saturday, 10 May 2014

Being a #MorrisonsMum

Celebrating the introduction of new lower prices that promise to stay low, Morrisons got together with Britmums and threw down a Bank Holiday shopping challenge for the #MorrisonsMum....

I was lucky enough to be picked to be a #MorrisonsMum for the Britmums' challenge, but I'm a Mum who regularly shops in Morrisons anyway. Not only do I like Morrison's market stall approach to fresh foods with butchers that butcher, bakers that bake and fishmongers who...er, but Morrisons started as a market stall on Bradford Market and it's head offices are still based there which, on a supermarket scale, makes it practically my local shop. And I do like to shop local.

For the purposes of the Bank Holiday challenge, I changed from shopping in my usual Morrisons in the city centre to the bigger version a little further out of town. To make it even more of a challenge I went on a Bank Holiday Saturday afternoon, the ONE time in the week when I wouldn't usually be seen dead in a supermarket for fear of incipient trolley rage and never-diminishing queues. But I was pleasantly surprised (or all the psychotic trolley wielding old ladies had gone away for the weekend), it was busy but there were enough checkouts open to ensure that I didn't have to queue when it was time for the reckoning.

Only mildly disappointed that the bigger Morrisons had yet to get the dry-iced fruit and veg displays I'd seen on other #MorrisonMum's Instagram shots, I threw myself enthusiastically into filling my trolley with the family's requirements for the Bank Holiday weekend.

Now, the thing about having four children (or in particular my four children) is taking into consideration the one who will eat This but won't eat That. While another will eat That but wouldn't touch This and yet another won't eat This or That, but will have Those. Meanwhile the other one ate Those when she got in last night and isn't hungry now. Or even awake.

Which brings me to the other consideration. The TeenTwins are 18, the Tween 12 and The Boy eight years old. All of them have Stuff To Do that means eating together as a whole family is something that has to be planned in advance, reservations booked and even then it may require handcuffing one or two of them to the dining table. Over a Bank Holiday weekend, it's even worse.

So for the weekend's food I went with a couple of trusty stand-bys:

First, a good old English fry up though in fact only element that gets fried are the eggs or those eggs that aren't scrambled instead. It does mean creating six entirely different plates of food, but at least means they all eat (roughly) at the same time and (vaguely) together. For The Boy; sausages, potato waffles and scrambled eggs. For The Tween; Hash brownies and beans. For TeenTwin ; just a bacon sandwich please. For TeenTwin 2, scrambled egg and bacon and for the grown-ups; the full works (with extra bacon for me).

Bot the Morrisons' Hash Brownies and the Potato Waffles were £1 a packet and there were still some left after the breakfast feasting. We used two tins of Savers beans at 24p a tin (I can never see any real difference between the saver and more expensive versions ad have decided the price difference is decided on the prettiness of the tin). Savers Beans might not be prettily dressed, but they taste the same as any other bean.

The sausages were Morrison's Signature Thick Outdoor Bred Pork Sausages, two packets for £5 and delicious. We tried the Savers bacon too, at £1.50 a packet. Again it might not look as prettily cut as more expensive bacon but that's it's only drawback. The eggs were £2 for ten large eggs and we used eight of them.

You can't have a fry up without some bread, so we toasted up some of Morrisons' yummy granary cob bread. Sold (and sliced in store) for 75p. We almost used up one whole cob, but we had bought two for a £1 and so had plenty left for another day.

In the end all six of us were fed for about £1.30 each. Not bad at all.

Next up was the piece de resistance of the weekend and a whole family favourite: Chicken Fajitas.

We rarely eat any other meat apart from chicken and I had bought three lots of breast fillets for £10 and used just one for the fajitas. The fajita mix I made up myself from store cupboard herb and spices:

Fry the chicken a little until it doesn't look raw, add sliced peppers and onions and the fajita seasoning mix, and cook until chicken is cooked through

The most important part of the meal is the trimmings. We used 2 packets of Morrisons' Savers Tortilla Wraps at 69p a packet and a packet of Morrison's Tex Mex Dips on special offer at £1 though I also had an extra tub of Sour Cream for 60p (You can never have enough sour cream #Fact).

You can't have enough grated cheddar either. So it was great to see that you can get two packets of Extra Mature Cheddar (our house cheese of choice) for £3.50. The amount of cheese we get through in this house, this could save me a FORTUNE. We used half of one packet... I know! We are cheese fiends :/

There was also salad, of course...

.. containing the some of the peppers left over from the fajita dish, 99p for three. Lettuce at 49p, vine ripe cherry tomatoes at 69p (but came combined in a three for £1.50 offer) and cucumber 49p. All that salad got eaten, but there was still enough left for several more salads during the week.

All in all *counts on fingers* ... er... *gets a calculator*... it worked out at (about) £1.58 a person. The skill of the cook is priceless though.

We thoroughly enjoyed the Morrisons challenge, mainly because TWICE over the Bank Holiday weekend we all ate vaguely together.

Hurrah!

Disclaimer I was given £80 in vouchers to spend as a #MorrisonsMum so I could blog our Morrisons experience. All views, opinions and recipes are my own.